


Homo Homini Lupus

by Greekhoop



Category: Petr & the Wulf (Album)
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2011-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greekhoop/pseuds/Greekhoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of men, beasts, and things in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homo Homini Lupus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vintar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vintar/gifts).



“Erudite” was a word the Wolf had taught him, and it meant the fancytalk of a man with an overburdening of book learning, though for ‘man’ you might as well substitute ‘wolf’, for the Wolf was just as _err-you-daight_ as any man alive.

The Wolf was ever filling Peter’s head with new words, but for the most part they went, as it were, in one ear and out the other. Peter fancied he could feel them do this, as if the words were composed of some warm colorless fluid that, once introduced to the ear canal, tickled around his brainpan for a spell before making for the nearest point of egress.

“Egress” was another of the Wolf’s words. That one had stuck too for some reason.

It came as something of a surprise to Peter that he had retained any of the vocabulary from the Wolf’s lessons at all. The Wolf did not speak any dialect of English that Peter had ever heard; indeed, he seemed unable to utter any word in any Christian tongue at all, though he had shown good understanding of many of them in the past. When the Wolf wished to impart his wisdom, then the lesson appeared, already fully formed, in Peter’s mind, with all the indignation and violence of a red-hot brand pressed onto a bull’s unsuspecting backside. It was a bit like an intellectual epiphany, only it came in reverse. Whereas the epiphany began within and burst outward quickly in all directions so that you had to make haste to catch it and hold it before it was gone, the lesson lit upon the surface and burrowed down to the core so that you had to do quite a bit of awkward digging if you wanted to recall it later.

The additions to Peter’s humble lexicon were an entirely unintended side effect, one which the Wolf had seemingly not even noticed, for the Wolf was a great speechifier but did not much care to be burdened by listening to what his pupil had to say. It was Grandfather who had first taken account of the change, when Peter had ascended the narrow stair to his room and apologized for being “remiss in the preparation of this evening’s repast.” He had heard Grandfather pacing and muttering to himself in the upstairs room for a long time after, and Peter was greatly aggrieved. In spite of everything, he didn’t want to cause any pain to come to the old man, the last of his relations, and he heartily repented of ever having to do the thing which he had done to him.

Peter looked forward to the day he would be able to bring Grandfather down from the upstairs room and live with him as family ought to. Under Grandfather’s guidance, he would obtain a good sturdy girl, with farmboy’s hips, good for breeding, and together they would begin the work of repopulating the Northrops of Lupercalia.

But in the meantime, there were the Wolf’s lessons.

Lectures were held intermittently, sometimes twice a week, sometimes less. In mating season, the Wolf disappeared for weeks on end, only to return – a little thinner, a little smugger – without apology or explanation.

Despite the lack of a fixed schedule, attendance was mandatory at every session. In the midnight hour, the Wolf would appear without fanfare outside the front gate of the Northrop compound, just as bold as you please, and he would wait patiently for Peter to rise from bed and dress and pull on his smart Hessian boots and his coat with the raccoon lining.

In the morning, the twin tracks made by Peter’s boots were clearly visible in the snow: one set going out, straight as an arrow, to the front gate, and the second set coming back. But of Wolftrack there was no sign.

It was the lack of physical evidence that had led Peter to suspect that the Wolf was nothing more than an exceptionally vivid sleep phantom, but on the next night, when the Wolf had made his appearance, and Peter had risen, ever dutiful, and gone out to meet him, he was greeted for the first time by the silvery glint of fangs in the light of the moon.

“You would do well not to dismiss me as one of your somnambulistic fancies,” the Wolf said. “I’m as real as anything in God’s creation.”

The word somnambulistic meant the making of sleep-mischief, but Peter did not know that until the Wolf told him. It did not stand to reason that a figment of his mind would know things that his mind did not already hold within, and in this way was Peter convinced that the Wolf was as real as anything in God’s creation.

***

On the longest night of the year, the Wolf paid him a visit. Peter came up out of sleep at once upon the Wolf’s arrival, but he was slow to rise. The Wolf always seemed to know the exact minute the fire burned down past the point of being easily re-ignited, and he waited until then to make an appearance. It must have given him a great deal of wolfish pleasure, Peter thought bitterly, to see him shiver.

Peter dressed in an extra set of woolen long-johns, then he put on his Hessian boots and his raccoon coat and trudged out to meet the Wolf.

It was a clear night with an abundance of stars, though the moon was already low in the winter sky. Each inhale burned his lungs with cold, and Peter could hear his hair crackling as the ends stiffened with frost. The Wolf was sitting on his haunches outside the gate, spinning a great white cloud around his shaggy head with each breath he let out.

“You’re late,” he said as Peter drew near. Peter did not bother making any reply.

The Wolf stretched out his front paws, lowering his fore-body so that Peter could climb onto his back. He caught a fistful of fur as he heaved himself up, pulling it harder than was necessary. The Wolf did not seem bothered by this in the slightest.

Once Peter was affixed in his usual seat, the Wolf set off at a good pace. The snow was deep, but he seemed able to traverse the drifts easily, as if he glided atop of the frozen white crust on top of them. They passed the edge of town, where the Scarebeast stood, shabby and dejected, bent beneath heaps of snow. Peter turned to watch it as they went by, but the Wolf did not spare it so much as a glance.

When the Wolf had a lesson prepared, he would always take Peter to a place of some consequence to the subject at hand. Once, they had gone to an open prairie, and the Wolf had told him that a battle had been fought there for the right of men to own other men in bondage. Another time, they had gone to a city of some significant age, and the Wolf had told him that the natives of this place had once been far advanced in astrology and medicine and science, but they had not had guns and this was the thing that undid them when it came time to stand against the Conquistadores.

Once, they had stood before a great body of water, and the Wolf had told him that this was the sea that men had once crossed in order to colonize and plunder, but even Peter knew that Lupercalia was a landlocked place and did not stand near any ocean.

He enjoyed the Wolf’s stories, though he liked them better when they set aside the theoretical for the salacious. Thus, they had been to the burned-out skeleton of a decent farmstead where the youngest son had been named Jacob Dumb and had been unclean with his mother and offended his father greatly. Thus, they had been to the dry well in the midst of the barren place where Isabella Murphy had poisoned the water and driven the people out.

Peter took the Wolf’s stories out often in those long quiet days that composed the span between one visit and the next. He turned them this way and that in his mind, looking at them from all angles, until he felt intimately acquainted with the Wolf’s host of sinners and malefactors, such that, in the evenings when the Wolf did not come, Peter would sit quiet, with closed eyes, and sketch for each player in the Wolf’s dramas a face, and a family, and a detailed history.

Peter hated to admit that he had felt a dreadful loneliness in the weeks after he had exiled Grandfather to the upstairs room. The stories drove the solitude back for a while.

That the Wolf was inclined to didacticism and lecturing was an unfortunate drawback. Peter had no care for platitudes. He had learned to tune the Wolf out when he began to descend into moralizing, to come back to attention when he re-emerged once more into the realm of hard facts.

On the night of the solstice – on this night – the Wolf made a sharp turn away from civilization and all the works of man, and, with Peter mounted firmly upon his back, he headed deep into the forest. Peter’s face was already numbed by the cold air, and now he had to endure the slaps of the low-hanging foliage. His nose had begun to run, coating the upper lip of his muffler with a humiliating film. He wished that the Wolf would hurry up and get around to lecturing so he could go home and go to bed.

But the Wolf kept running, further into the forest until they had left the hunting trails behind. Even then, the Wolf did not slow, but plunged so skillfully between trees and over boulders and fallen trunks that Peter never once felt imperiled.

They came at last to a stone ridge amidst the trees, with a dugout beneath it that led back into a burrow in the rock. Peter reckoned by the size of it that it was the den of some good-sized animal, perhaps a catamount or a wild dog.

The Wolf once again lowered his fore-body, and Peter slid off his back and sank at once up to his knees into the drifted snow. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his coat and clenched and unclenched them, trying to drive the blood back into his fingertips. The Wolf was looking at him with inscrutable tawny eyes.

“Well?” Peter demanded. “What is it this time?”

The Wolf sat down hard on his haunches, and scratched at a ratty ear with his hind leg.

“You drag me out of bed on the coldest night of the year,” Peter pressed on. “You’d better have a right good story for me. Something with killing, and sex, and blood, and revenge…”

“I don’t have any more stories for you,” the Wolf said.

Peter fell silent, but he had forgotten to close his mouth. It hung open, expelling great puffs of white with each exhalation.

“That is to say, any further tales I might recount you would only serve to reiterate and clarify points already touched upon during this course of study.”

Peter felt the points of his jaw tightening, as if someone were winding the springs inside his skull. “You won’t tell me any more stories? Then what the hell's the good of you?”

“Young man, I did not undertake this task so that I might be your personal Scheherazade,” the Wolf said with dignity. “You come from good stock and proud pedigree, and I knew that you alone amongst your blockheaded peers would appreciate having those twin blossoms of taint and corruption nipped in the bud, so to speak.”

“I ain’t about to speak for my peers,” Peter replied. “I don’t know hardly nothing about none of them.”

“I know,” the Wolf soothed. “I could not ask of them what I have asked of you: to bear witness to the breadth and depth of mankind’s folly. For a man alone is a creature of naught but pettiness and vanity and meanness, but a man in the company of other men sees all these faults magnified a hundred fold.”

Peter spoke through gritted teeth. It seemed he could hardly open his mouth far enough to let the words out, so tight and rigid had his jaw become. “I ain’t like that.”

“No,” the Wolf said. “Not at present. But then, you’re young and still cutting your teeth upon the world. That’s why, for your final lesson, I have brought you here, where even stouthearted men do not tread. I’ve set aside this place for you, so that you might shuck off the trappings of mankind and cohabitate amongst beasts, the hymen of your youthful innocence preserved indefinitely.”

The Wolf smiled a toothy, lupine smile. Peter slouched in his raccoon coat, unimpressed.

“If men are so bad and beasts is so great, then how do you explain the Butcher Bird? She’s as stuck on herself as any shallow girl. All she does is sit up in a tree all day, bemoaning how she ain’t got herself a man yet.”

“I am sure I don’t know her,” the Wolf said.

“And that Duck. He’s as lazy as any layabout drunkard, and he ain’t even got whiskey to serve as an excuse.”

“I do not have the pleasure of his acquaintance,” said the Wolf.

“I guess not,” Peter replied, and to this the Wolf made no reply.

“Anyway,” Peter ground out. “Wouldn’t be nobody to take care of Grandfather.”

“Of course,” the Wolf said. “Something would have to be done about him. But your Grandfather and I have long had an acquaintanceship so there would be no need to trouble your pretty little head about him.”

They regarded each other in silence for what seemed a long time. Peter’s feet were beginning to lose feeling, so he shifted, trying to bring it back. Snow spilled over the tops of his Hessian boots and soaked into his wool socks.

“Goddamnit!” he spat out abruptly, stomping his feet and succeeding only in trapping more snow within.

“If you ain’t going to tell me about some man who got a mind to murder or some woman who got a mind to go a-whoring, then just take me home before I catch my death.”

The Wolf was slow to move, but at last he lowered his fore-body so that Peter could climb stiffly astride. He straightened up, but did not move. “I am confident you will give all due consideration to my offer.”

“I considered it already,” Peter said.

“I would not extend such a tiding to just anyone. I would not have extended it to you, were it not for the fact that you are sprung from decent lineage, and I suspect you are capable of doing something more than drifting untethered through your life, breathing up all the air allotted to you before your final reckoning. You can do both, young man: breathe and think, and it would be beneficial to you to think well on this.”

“I said, I done all the thinking I’m going to do.”

“You will certainly feel differently after you sleep on it,” the Wolf said, and with that he started off through the woods at a good clip. After a time, they came through a thicket of trees and then they were back on a familiar path. It was none too soon for Peter, who was frozen through and through.

The Wolf brought him back to the gate of the compound and let him slide to the ground. Peter struggled with the lock, his fingers too stiff to raise the latch. When he glanced back before going inside, the Wolf was gone, leaving behind no trace. Peter knew that he would be back in due time, or at least that he was planning to return.

But Peter had a plan of his own.

The Wolf would have called it an undignified display, but who was he, a brute beast, to bear witness against tricksters and traitors and opportunists?

As Peter walked back toward the tumbledown Northrop Mile, he had to clutch his lapels together with his fists. He had to take slow shuffling steps, so that the tracks that returned did not match the tracks that went out. There was good reason for this, though. All the buttons were missing from Peter’s raccoon coat, and all the brass fastenings had been torn off his Hessian boots. He had scattered them behind him on the way returning from the Wolf’s lair, and they had shown up clear enough on the undisturbed snow.

The Hunters had already calculated the Wolf’s worth in terms of pelts and skulls and tails, and they, who had a knack for following signs, would have no trouble tracking the beast on the morrow, when Peter showed them the way.

~The End


End file.
